Free Argumentative Essay About Consequences Of Social Media:

A Society That Cannot Communicate

A Society That Cannot Communicate
For most people in our current society hardly a day goes by without checking in on Facebook, pinning a cool craft on Pinterest, connecting professionally on Linked In, or sharing pictures on Instagram. Social media is prevalent; it is everywhere one looks. It is on our laptops, tablets, and our phones. It is the norm to update statuses regularly, whether anything interesting is going on or not. Relationships start and fizzle all on the social media stage. People share their meals, activities, political ideas, and more. Most people cannot imagine leaving the house without their phone in hand, and checking it for status notifications often. On the surface all of this social networking seems to be connecting us with others more and doing so easier. Unfortunately, this is not necessarily the case. Social networking is detrimental to true community and relationships.
Before the advent of social sites, there was regular e-mail. People felt empowered to better keep in touch with family and friends. In fact, “Fifty-five percent of Internet users have said that e-mail has improved their communication with family, and 66 percent have said their contact with friends has also improved” (Turnbull 2010). Although e-mail may have been a beneficial tool, something changed as social media began to replace regular e-mail. Whereas e-mail was used as a replacement for a regular letter, social media is different. Instead of allowing one to send a message quickly, it takes massive amounts of time. Gone are the days of sending a quick not to Aunt Sue and then sitting down and having dinner with friends or family. Now a person would write on Aunt Sue’s wall, scroll through their newsfeed, click like a few times, share a meme, and reply back to a joke someone shared. And they might do all this while sitting at the table ignoring the family or friends around them.
One of the major issues with social media is its use to propagate fear. Sites like Twitter and Facebook have made it all too easy to share about crimes that once were only local news. It seems not a day goes by that I do not see an article about another pedophile in a school or a child being abducted. “Much of this has occurred through the expanded use of evocative communication formats that present the world through the problem frame.” (Altheide, 2002). Social media is used to show the problems in our society. This is causing us to be a society of fear. Things that were once taken for granted, like kids outside playing on their own, are becoming controversial. When I was young, we played outside until the streetlights came on. Now parents are being investigated for letting their children go to the park. Considering the invention of cell phones, and the ability to locate someone wherever they are, it would be logical that parents should be less fearful. Instead, the opposite is true. Social media has caused greater fear of crime, causing a rift in real community.
Lady Greenfield, who is a professor at Lincoln College, Oxford, spoke in front of the House of Lords and said, “[social networking sites] are devoid of cohesive narrative and long-term significance. As a consequence, the mid-21st century mind might almost be infantilised, characterised by short attention spans, sensationalism, inability to empathise and a shaky sense of identity" (Wintour n.p.). This kind of possible change in behavior is inevitably going to have a negative impact on people’s ability to take part in a cohesive community. How can people socialize when they are creating a drama filled environment and cannot care about each other in a meaningful way? Greenfields prediction is a scary one. A group of people who are unable to empathize with one another, or who sensationalize every aspect of life, cannot hope to have a healthy community.
Greenfield also talks of “a much more marked preference for the here-and-now, where the immediacy of an experience trumps any regard for the consequences” (Wintour, n.p.) as a result of social networking. We have a generation who expects instant gratification. They also consider consequences less. This translates into people who do what they want, regardless of those around them. A community cannot function when people indiscriminately do what they want. For instance, if I like to have loud parties every weekend, and do so aware of the fact my downstairs neighbor has young children, what kind of relationship could I ever expect to have with them? Also, although there might not be direct consequences to me, I am not considering the consequences to those around me. This incessant need for instant gratification is driving a wedge into the communities we once had.
Another issue emerging from the overuse of social media is a decrease in children’s ability to read emotions in other people. An experiment was performed where preteens spent five days in an outdoor camp with no access to screens (Uhls et al., 2014). The preteens took pre and posttest’s to measure their responses to nonverbal emotional cues (Uhls et al., 2014). Findings were as follow:
We found that children who were away from screens for five days with many opportunities for in-person interaction improved significantly in reading facial emotion (DANVA 2), compared to those in the control group, who experienced their normal media exposure during an equivalent five-day period (F5,88 = 4.06, p < .05, d = .33). In the experimental condition, participants went from an average of 14.02 errors in the Faces pretest (including both child and adult faces) to an average of 9.41 errors in the posttest (a reduction of 4.61 errors), while the control group went from and average of 12.24 to 9.81, which was a reduction of 2.43 errors (we attribute this change to a practice effect). Thus, the group that attended camp without access to any screen-based media improved significantly more than the control group, who experienced their usual amount of screen time. (Uhls et al., 2014).
This means that the more time children spend on social media, the less they are able to tell what others are feeling or thinking by noticing simple body language. This has huge implications considering the increasing usage of social media. We may be raising a generation who is unable to have meaningful communication, since the ability to read body language is imperative to communication. This has bearing on our communities, because they will continue to fall apart as communication decays.
This issue does not just affect children. Ethan Kross from the University of Michigan did a study tracking a group of young adults and how they felt over a two week interval. They then correlated this information against their Facebook usage. The study found:
The more time participants spent on the social media site, the less good they felt about their own lives. But face-to-face contact with actual people was an antidote to those negative feelings. CNN theorized that Facebook usage could drag people down because of the perception that their friends lead more fabulous lives (Kross, 2013).
Keeping up with the Joneses has always been part of society, as we compare ourselves to our neighbors. It has gone to a whole new level, where we have hundreds or thousands of people to compare ourselves to. It is inevitable that people would feel a sense of disappointment at their own lives when comparing themselves to the perfection people portray on social media. Instead of some friendly neighborhood competition, it has become a bombardment of worldwide competition.
The competition does not just cause unhappiness from comparison, it also can cause increased mood disorders such as anxiety and depression. A study indicated that increased use of Facebook elevates the chance of people experiencing mood disorders (Rosen, Whaling, Rab, Carrier, and Cheever, 2013). Increased social media use also can cause increased narcissism, compulsive behavior, antisocial behavior and more (Rosen, Whaling, Rab, Carrier, and Cheever, 2013). The biggest indicator of mood disorders was Facebook usage, “For the mood disorders, for example, while more Facebook impression management predicted more signs of major depression, more general Facebook use, more Facebook impression management and more Facebook friends predicted mania.” (Rosen, Whaling, Rab, Carrier, and Cheever, 2013). This may explain why it seems that more people are suffering from depression than ever before. If everyone is suffering from mood disorders from lack of face to face social interaction, it actually becomes harder to start having face to face interaction. Instead of having a community, we are becoming a people group of over medicated depressed people.
Obviously we live in a changing society and social networking is prevalent. Regrettably, the prevalence of social media is affecting the cohesion of our communities. Social media takes up time people once spent in face to face interactions. It also has caused people to fear each other more. People who over use social media sensationalize life more and lack empathy. The need for instant gratification has increased and the thought of consequences has decreased. More social media use leads to a decreased ability to read non-verbal signals. Overuse of social media causes people to be less happy. And finally, more Facebook usage causes increased mood disorders including depression and narcissism. All of these different issues lead to people who are unable to effectively communicate with each other. Social media is here to stay, and has its uses, but unless we learn to curb our time spent on it more issues will be created. The breakdown of effective communication is leading to a breakdown of our communities. The consequences of social media use are pervasive and many still lie undiscovered. One thing that is clear: the more that social media is used, the less we will have a true community.

References

Altheide, D. (2002). The Lens of Fear. In Creating fear: News and the construction of crisis. New York: Aldine de Gruyter.
Kross, E. (2013, September 14). Ethan Kross - University of Michigan Institute for Social Research. Retrieved March 9, 2015.
Rosen, L., Whaling, K., Rab, S., Carrier, L., & Cheever, N. (2013). Is Facebook creating “iDisorders”? The link between clinical symptoms of psychiatric disorders and technology use, attitudes and anxiety. Computers in Human Behavior, 29(3), 1243-1254.
Turnbull, C. (2010). Mom Just Facebooked Me and Dad Knows How to Text: The Influences of Computer-Mediated Communication on Interpersonal Communication and Differences Through Generations. The Elon Journal of Undergraduate Research in Communications, 1(1).
Uhls, Y., Michikyan, M., Morris, J., Garcia, D., Small, G., Zgourou, E., & Greenfield, P. (2014). Five days at outdoor education camp without screens improves preteen skills with nonverbal emotion cues. Computers in Human Behavior, 39, 387-392.
Wintour, P. (2009, February 24). Facebook and Bebo Risk 'infantilising' the Human Mind. The Guardian. Retrieved March 8, 2015.